Volume 12 Number 6 



The Plant World 



A Magazine of General Botany 

 JUNE, 1909 



DARWINISM AND EXPERIMENTATION IN BOTANY. 

 By D. T. MacDougal. 

 (Continued from May number.) 



Although the greater number of Darwin's followers were not 

 able to join him in these exacting methods of scrutinization of 

 natural phenomena, yet he was not alone in the movement 

 toward the adoption of exact methods, as the means by which 

 safe, steady and substantial progress might be made "in biological 

 science. A few of the leading investigators had already begun 

 to put to test and trial all organic activities which came within 

 the scope of their researches. In the forefront of these was 

 Julius von Sachs, the very prince of experimentalists, to whom 

 must be ascribed a great impetus and influence in the develop- 

 ment of the possibilities of the new mode of inquiring into physio- 

 logical problems. Sachs and his school directed their efforts 

 to the delimitation of the primitive capacities of living matter, 

 to the calibration of the functionation of organs, and to the 

 physiology and ontogeny of the individual, while attention to 

 evolutionary subjects was principally monopolized by naturalists 

 engaged in studying ''undisturbed nature" to very little profit. 



It is most suggestive to recall that among the younger 

 workers who came to get the view point of Sachs, was Francis 

 Darwin, and the effects of his experiences are plainly manifest 

 in some of the contributions in which he joined with his father. 

 The movement from the anatomical, and comparative mor- 

 phological views of Hofmeister, DeBary and Schwendener to 

 modern dynamical, physiological morphology founded by Sachs 

 and exploited by Goebel, has been slowly made, and so recently 

 that it has not yet received full recognition by the pedagogic 

 representation of botany, while the interrupted task of bringing 

 evolution within the scope of experimental science so fairly 



